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I quite liked Doom 2016's approach, the main thing to find were weapon upgrades (which were sometimes hidden, sometimes not), but there weren't very meany of them and each had a very distinct effect (effectively letting you choose a new variant of one of your existing weapons.)

That part is fine, since it's just finding the secrets to get some cool stuff. But grinding? Forcing you to replay the game, not because it's fun, but because of loot and Ubisoft-style junk collection? Urgh.

I'm seeing essentially the same upgrade systems from Doom 2016 presented differently or with more options, with maybe one actual new wrinkle of upgrading armour/health/ammo letting you choose different perks. Given that you have four slots for each, that's 12 sentinel crystals to get you to max spec - I don't think that calls for any grinding, because as far as I remember, Doom 2016 let you find upgrade orbs through its levels the same way. If Doom Eternal's as long a game with as many levels, it should be safe to assume grinding won't be necessary. If they mean you go back because like a Metroidvania move unlocks get you to different areas in levels, I think that's really okay.

Also, from the preview: 'The game is eager to show you what you've found and what you haven't, so you'll either move on or come back to that level. Either way, it wants you to keep playing.' Still: Tweaktown? I adored those guys' tweak guides in the past (and their tweaked GPU drivers), but the style of reporting in the preview seems calibrated to push buttons.

Anyway, what would concern me is those card sets or whatever, but as long as that's just multiplayer specific nonsense that I don't have to care about in SP, I prefer not caring.

I don't think they will have anything approaching RPG levels of grind, but upgrading your health, armor, and ammo capacity seems really out of place in the first place in a Doom game. At one point in the Giant Bomb video when they show the new wossname challenge, they talk about how there was a tooltip suggesting the player come back when they have gotten more upgrades. Having to upgrade yourself into beating a challenge is not really what Doom has ever been about.

Also, while this one system has 12 upgrade points, it seems there is also some sort of a long game where it takes a while to gather all the combat points and unlock all the things in your home base. And it does seem the maps are meant to be revisited over and over again. I'll be happy if that's only multiplayer nonsense, cause I've basically given up on Doom multiplayer at this point, but why does it have to be in the single player game and affect the level and game design?

To be fair, Doom is not the first FPS of its kind doing this. Shadow Warrior also had all kinds of upgrades to what I thought was a detriment to the game.

Well, I didn't mind the upgrade orbs last time. The combat encounter gauge is from the first game. The change seems to be where you'd search for upgrade drones in 2016, in Eternal you earn upgrade parts through encounters - which means you get to upgrade by killing stuff instead of searching for drones hidden in inconvenient places.

As far as unlocking stuff at the home base is concerned, we'll have to see. What I saw was those big batteries you collect unlock areas back at the hub - I think it's fair to say the game would lead you to essential unlocks through the, er, story, while if there's anything optional, it will remain optional.

Look, if the game becomes a Ubisoft-style map trudgefest, I'll have harsh words for it. As of right now, I'm seeing an evolution of what came before. If it really turns out as some sort of grindy behemoth that makes you rinse areas multiple times just to get on with the campaign, they can fuck off; but we'll need more concrete data before we can evaluate that.

Except some of the combat encounters are hidden, so you still get to upgrade stuff by searching for combat encounters hidden in inconvenient places.

I'm not saying the game is at the point of a Ubisoft-style collectathon yet, necessarily. But at the very least it is an evolution of stuff I already disliked in the first game. And all the previews seem to say that there is a ton of stuff to find and unlock and upgrade, so I don't think I'm unduly concerned.

What it boils down for me is this -- when it comes to a simple visceral shooter like Doom, I don't want to spend time thinking about whether I should put points in health or increase my ammo limit, I don't want to spend time doing platforming puzzles, and I don't want to revisit locations just to scour the map for what I have missed or to retread old ground to get to the one area I wasn't able to reach previously. In limited amounts or in isolation, it might be fine, but here it's just one thing on top of the other and a lot of it seems excessive and superfluous for a game as based on mastering player skill as Doom is. For example, there's a perk that reduces glory kill time. Why wouldn't I want to have glory kills be already as fast and as little gameplay flow interrupting as possible? Why do I have to upgrade gameplay systems into being less annoying or my character into not being hampered by low ammo capacity?

Having been a massive Doom player of Dooms 1 & 2, the concept of adding in further RPG elements feels less Doom-y. I mean the concept itself is perfectly fine in any other game whether it be FPS focused or otherwise. But in a Doom game though no. That's not what Doom is all about.

The Glory Kill time perk was also in Doom 2016. To me, this sounds like if you had issues with Doom 2016, they're not going to be made better here. I liked it just fine, so I'm not particularly bothered about things like that. The core experience is fast and visceral, and plays faster than the original Doom - as long as that's preserved, it's gravy.

Um, that's what I've been telling you. Stuff like rune mastery that forces you to do x amount of stuff to get the upgrade just fundamentally rubs me the wrong way in a game like Doom. It's needless busywork at best. And, like I said in the beginning, it's not just the upgrades, but also the climbable walls and punch blocks and all the other stuff that feels very much out of place.

And it only gets exacerbated in further playthroughs. When I picked up the reboot, at first I was very impressed how much of the original still seemed to be in there. In fact, I unabashedly praised it here at the time. When I put it down, though, I knew a second playthrough wasn't in the cards, in no small part because the game feel at the end and at the beginning was so different and I really didn't care for having to get all the stuff again.

Yeah, I thought you were okay with 2016, but the retroactive dissatisfaction wasn't obvious. Can't expect a sequel to it is to not expand on those ideas, right? Might as well skip it if you weren't happy where they went, because out of the two kinds of sequels, this one from all appearances goes the route of 'the same, but more'. More like Doom: Eterna-notagain-al, eh.

Imo the upgrades did hurt 2016 a bit, since I really didn't find the early stages of the game to be all that fun. It was only once it really kicked into gear later that it became a blast. And I know a lot of people felt the later levels were weaker and less open, but I really felt the opposite - the front end of the game was a bit dull and padded.

The guy makes a point in the video about glory kills being a much needed breather that allow you to think and survey the situation, though the last time I found that they interrupted the flow for me more than they helped. Anyway, at least it looks like the combat will keep you more on your toes and moving around than the last instalment of the reboot and there are tougher and more deadly enemies as well.

Yeah, I thought you were okay with 2016, but the retroactive dissatisfaction wasn't obvious. Can't expect a sequel to it is to not expand on those ideas, right? Might as well skip it if you weren't happy where they went, because out of the two kinds of sequels, this one from all appearances goes the route of 'the same, but more'. More like Doom: Eterna-notagain-al, eh.

It's not like I hated the reboot. I thought it was a solid 8/10 game. Not great, but not terrible by any means. Though the reboot did catch me off guard in many ways. I had expected them to screw it up in a big way, especially after Doom 3 and after hearing all those things about the development and seeing that ridiculous box art. So them keeping cutscene bullshit at a minimum and the game being fast-paced and more focused on arenas and verticality than linear corridors was a really pleasant surprise. But I also think some things outstayed their welcome and became minor annoyances by the end of the game. And the new game seems to have more of both some of the old things that I got tired of (eg. glory kills, cutscenes, upgrades...) as well as some new things that I really don't like the look of (eg. platforming sections, puzzles, home decorating...).

Anyway, me not being happy with the direction a game takes or not liking an aspect of it doesn't mean I will necessarily have to skip it. I disliked the boss fights and quite a few other things about the new Deus Ex games and I still played them. And, like I said, it's not like fast-paced shooters grow on trees.

I'm only three chapters in but am digging it so far. If you liked DOOM (2016) then this is more of the same but with everything cranked up to 11. There is also more nuance to the combat as enemies now have weak points to exploit which encourages you to use the right weapon on the right enemy in the right way in order to take them out faster otherwise you're going to be in a more difficult fight. Unlike DOOM (2016), you can't just wreck everyone and everything with the super shotgun.

Mick live streamed this in the first couple of hours of the game going public. I decided to wait for next month to buy it and bought Alyx instead, but this nearly pushed me over the edge. Good thing I had my kids this weekend or I would have caved.

As a music producer, Mick Gordon gets me pretty excited. He's not all that innovative, but he knows how to find that groove and feel.

The music was a big part of what won me over to the reboot initially. Probably elevated the whole game from good to very good. At least in this category, the new Doom games don't get any complaints from me.

Interesting - his GDC talk on Doom 2016 music is worth a look - he explains a lot about how he created a "Doom Instrument" pushing a sine wave through a number of guitar pedals.

I thought more of you might be playing this - unusually for me I actually pre-ordered it. Listening to the music had me replaying Doom 2016 again, where I turned the sound effects down to get the music upfront.

Initially I found Doom Eternal a tad overwhelming as it throws a lot more stuff at you - like SDF121 says you have to use particular weapons to break the defences of some demons so I've certainly been switching them more often than I was in the previous game.
I've found that when progression through the next large battle is a bit frustrating or I fancied a break the game makes it interesting to replay you backtrack for Preator points that you missed, you can farm extra lives, and you can collect cheat codes to make the replays quicker and also a bit hilarious.
I'm nearly at the end now - although some sections have been frustrating - such as just falling of the map and getting stuck in a corner in a demon dogpile - yet overall it has been satisfying. I'm not someone who usually likes a game just for the gameplay challenge so it's interesting to find myself developing some sort of strategy - although that seems to be running away in circles to get away from the horde.
I've found the lore to be interesting as well - it is of course written around a game about shooting things but it's done really well and seems to reinforce the various environments you travel through. It leaves ambiguity but manages to integrate the material from Doom 2016 really well.

The music is great of course - and that sits very well with the environments alongside the lore. I think anyone looking for more Doom will get value from it.

I'm really glad I initially skipped on this to play Alyx, but with the sale this last week I had to pick it up because I was really hyped about it. All the complaining about the new direction they took the gameplay loop made me want to play it even more.

Then I started playing it.

I think I'm an apologist by nature when it comes to my favorite games and I'm not going to be shy about it, but as much as I'm trying to love this game, I'm just finding it's too much work. I understand what they were trying to do to force the player into playing the way they designed it, but at a first glance, It's just too Arcadey for me to enjoy it as a Doom game. They did that stupid thing where there is some sort of crapton of exposition needed to explain why the hell you start where you do, without any explanation of how things went since the previous game other than "earth is hell now" and I'm finding it very jarring.

I have to agree with the complaints about the level design, because it doesn't feel rooted in the language of the game that has been setup. It's like its' from a different universe than the one we played in 2016, and I'm not just talking about the floating powerups. This really feels a lot more like a Warhammer 40K game you'd play at the arcade if such things actually existed in this decade.

The secret hunting isn't fun, and even though they've given you some sort of fast travel mechanic that you can use toward the end of each level to go back and bypass all the point-of-no-return spots to grab secrets you missed, they do a piss poor job of telling you when you can do it, and if you miss your opportunity, you have to play the massive level all over again anyway. 3 missions in a row I have missed the prompt that supposedly came up to tell me I could now fast travel, I still don't know what it looks like. The catch is if you finish the mission, you lose your chance, and so far most of the missions end with defeating an enemy which goes straight to a cutscene and the ends the level.

The combat loop itself is pretty fun once you get the hang of it, but I'm never going to reach mastery level. I think I'm a damn good FPS twitch shooter player. I was born in the 80s and I played a shit ton of UT99 in my teens. But I can't play this game at any enjoyable level above "hurt me plenty" which is the 2nd lowest difficulty level. I'm not going to be winning any eSports matches any time soon, but that seems a bit steep for me.

But when you fold that into unlockables and a completionist mindset, it just becomes work. And suddenly Doom just isn't fun anymore. Doom isn't fun! And that's a travesty.

example: Gore nests are now more like a level secret. You find one, you pop it, then you get a very brief combat challenge (much like the rune challenges in 2016) which is a cool idea, BUT. You have like 20 seconds to somehow negotiate a way around killing a bunch of demons that spawn in. Yes it's cool that they've designed it so you have to think your way around beating it, but in the latest one I tried 8 or 9 times to complete this is the scenario: You have 20 seconds to kill 2 mancubi and 2 zombies. The gore nest is about 2.5 seconds traversal away from the "arena". The mancubi are bullet sponges and you have limited ammunition, so you literally don't have enough time to kill them through attrition. If you want to destroy their cannons first, that will eat up 4 precision shots with your machine gun, which takes nearly a full second to reload after every shot, and if you glory kill one of them, the animation is about 4 - 4.5 seconds long.

I'm not even rage quitting, I'm sad quitting.

I get why it's getting its 9 and 10 ratings if the reviewers are focusing on certain specific aspects of the game, but I think they have a miss here. I don't think the way they did this is going illicit any long term love. Coupled with the debacle that has happened with the OST (which I have to admit is at least 50% Micks' fault if not more), I just don't see this becoming a classic.

This pretty much nails it on the head here. I agree completely. It's like they took all of the crap from Doom 2016 that made it arcadey, and just doubled down on it. I liked Doom 3, the environments especially (minus the super obvious monster closets), but Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal just crapped all over it.

Highly frustrated at the game having ammo caps so low that I'm pretty much permanently out of ammo and have to seriously consider every shot - that's very, very, un-Doom to me.
Hopefully it will get better when I can (presumably) unlock ammo capacity upgrades, but it's a bad first impression.